"I tell you, Satan's gonna have no trouble taking over here 'cause all the women are gonna say: 'What a cute butt.' 'He's Satan!' 'You don't know him like I do.' 'He's the Prince of Darkness!' 'I can change him.'"

A form of Misaimed Fandom, when a fandom takes a controversial or downright villainous character and downplays his/her flaws, often turning him/her into an object of desire and/or a victim in the process. This can cause conflicts if the writers are not willing to retool the character to fit this demand.

Common reasons for this include the character being wicked in a classy or cool way. A physically attractive villain is much more likely to be subject to this trope than a physically ugly one; Beauty Equals Goodness, after all, and shallow as it may be, it seems that, for some fans, this is the case even when the character's beauty only extends to their appearance. All Girls Want Bad Boys may be a factor with male villains getting a female fandom that views them through this lens.

Some villain archetypes, such as the Smug Snake (because of their off-puttingly arrogant personality), female villains (because it's mostly Fangirls who invoke this trope), and the Complete Monster (because of the severity of their evil deeds and absence of redeemability) are rarely susceptible to this, but it can still happen.

Jerkass Dissonance usually plays a part in this trope; it is much easier for people to forgive and overlook the negative qualities and stress the Freudian Excuses that form a sympathetic back-story for fictional characters than it is to do the same for people in real life, because the actions of the fictional character have no real-world effect.

When the audience embraces or admires a villain more because of his or her chutzpah and/or Break the Haughty potential than out of actual admiration, and are still perfectly fine with them receiving their ultimate defeat in the end, then it's Love to Hate.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy